“Hey, Hank, come on back here,” Pendergast called. “Only you got to take your oath along with the rest of us never to let on what we’re talking about here tonight.”
“What’s the general subject?” I asked.
“You know as well as we do,” Jesse Turtle said.
“I reckon.” I stuck my right hand in the air as though the Bible was in my left.
“We were going to draw straws,” Pendergast said, “but Billy Baldwin here just volunteered.”
I pulled up a chair, making the ninth or tenth man, and waited to hear what Baldwin had volunteered to do. I haven’t mentioned him before because there wasn’t reason, even though Nancy Baldwin was one of the women that came whooping down the road after the fire alarm. Billy wasn’t the most popular man in town—kind of a braggart and boring as a magpie. Whenever anybody had an idea, Billy had a better one, and he hardly ever stopped talking. The bus route he was driving at the time ran up-county, starting from the Courthouse steps, so he had to take his own car to and from his job at different times of day and night. By now you’ve probably guessed what he’d volunteered for.
I made it a point to stay away from the Red Lantern the night he planned to stop there. I got to admit, though, I was as curious as the rest of the bunch to learn how he’d make out with Clara, so I hung around Turtle’s with them. The funny thing was, I was the last man in the place. Long before closing time, Pendergast, then Prouty, then Kincaid, all of them dropped out and went home to their own beds. Turtle locked up behind me.
The next day Baldwin stopped by the tavern on the way to work and told Jesse that nothing happened, that he’d just sat at the bar with Clara, talking and working up to things. “The big shot’s getting chicken,” Pendergast said when Turtle passed the word.
None of us said much. Counting chickens. I know I was.
Well, it was a week before Billy Baldwin came in with his verdict. As far as he could tell, Clara McCracken might still be a virgin, he said. He’d finally come right out and slipped a twenty-dollar bill on the bar the last night and asked her to wear the negligee she’d had on the night of the false alarm. At that point, Clara reached for the birch stick behind the bar and he took off, leaving the money where it was.
“You’re lucky she didn’t reach for the shotgun,” Prouty said.
We all chipped in to make up the twenty dollars.
Things quieted down after that and I continued to split my drinking time between Turtle’s and the Red Lantern. Clara would get the occasional oiler coming through to check the pumps, and the duck and deer-hunting seasons were good business, but she never did get much of the town custom, and the rumors about her and that negligee hung on. It wasn’t the sort of gear you sent away to Sears Roebuck for, but the post office in Webbtown was run by a woman then and I don’t think any of us ever did find out where that particular garment came from. Maybe she’d sent away for it while she was still in prison. Like I said early on, Clara had done a lot of planning in fifteen years.
Now I just said things quieted down. To tell the truth, it was like the quiet before a twister comes through. I know I kept waiting and watching Clara, and Clara watched me watching her. One day she asked me what they were saying about her in the town.
I tried to make a joke of it. “Nothing much. They’re getting kind of used to you, Clara.”
She looked at me with a cold eye. “You in on that Billy Baldwin trick?”
I thought about the oath I was supposed to have sworn. “What trick?” I asked.
“Hank,” she said, “for a lawyer you ain’t much of a liar.”
“I ain’t much of a lawyer, either,” I said. Then, looking her straight in the face, sure as fate straighter than I looked at myself, I said, “Clara, how’d you like to marry me?”
She set back on her heels and smiled in that odd way of having to work at it. “Thank you kindly.” She cast her eyes up toward the license, which I’d just about forgotten. “We got one partnership going and I think that ought to do us—but I do thank you, old Hank.”
I’ve often wondered what I’d have done it she’d said yes.
But I’ve come around since to holding with the Reverend Barnes. Everything was set in its course long before it happened—including Clara’s planning.
September passed, October, and it came the full, cold moon of November. You could hear wolves in the Ragapoo Hills and the loons—and which is lonesomer-sounding I wouldn’t say. I’ve mentioned before how light a sleeper I am. I woke up this night to a kind of whispering sound, a sort of swish, a pause, and then another swish, a pause, and then another. When I realized it was outside my window, I got up and looked down on the street.
There, passing in the silvery moonlight—a few feet between them (I think now to keep from speaking to one another)—the women of the town were moving toward the Red Lantern. By the time I got within sight of them up there, they’d formed a half circle around the front of the inn which was in total darkness. One of the women climbed the steps and went inside. I knew the door had not been locked since I unlocked it when I brought Clara home.
I kept out of sight and edged round back to where I had been the night of the false alarm. I saw the car parked there and knew it belonged to Billy Baldwin. If I could have found a way in time, I’d have turned in a false alarm myself, but I was frozen in slow motion. I heard the scream and the clatter in the building, and the front door banging open. Billy Baldwin came running out stark naked. He had some of his clothes with him, but he hadn’t waited to put them on. Behind him was his wife Nancy, sobbing and crying and beating at him until one of the women came up and took her away down toward the town.
Billy had stopped in his tracks, seeing the circle of women. He was pathetic, trying to hide himself first and then trying to put his pants on, and the moonlight throwing crazy shadows on the women. Then I saw Clara come out of the door on my side of the building. She was wearing the negligee and sort of drifted like a specter around the veranda to the front.
The women began to move forward.
Billy, seeing them come, fell on his knees and held out his hands, begging. I started to pray myself. I saw that every woman was carrying a stone. They kept getting closer, but not a one raised her arm until Clara went down and picked up a stone from her own drive which she flung at Billy.
He was still on his knees after that, but he fell almost at once beneath the barrage that followed. One of those stones killed him dead, though I didn’t know it at the time.
Clara went back up the steps and picked her way through the stones. She kicked at what was left of poor, lying, cheating Billy as hard as she could. The women found more stones then and threw them at her until she fled into the inn and closed the door.
Nobody’s been arrested for Billy’s murder. I don’t think anyone ever will be. It ought to be Clara, if anyone, but I’d have to bear witness that the man was still alive after she’d thrown the stone. She’s never forgiven the women for turning on her. She kept telling me how glad she was when they came to take Billy in adultery. And I wore myself out asking her what the heck she thought she was doing.
Along toward summer a baby boy was born to Clara. She had him christened Jeremiah McCracken after his grandfather. At the christening she said to me, “See, Hank. That’s what I was doing.” I’m going to tell you, I’m glad that when Jeremiah McCracken comes old enough to get a tavern license, I’ll be in my grave by then. I hope of natural causes.
1983
About the Author
Dorothy Salisbury Davis is a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America, and a recipient of lifetime achievement awards from Bouchercon and Malice Domestic. The author of seventeen crime novels, including the Mrs. Norris Series and the Julie Hayes Series; three historical novels; and numerous short stories; she has served as president of the Mystery Writers of America and is a founder of Sisters in Crime.
Born in Chicago in 1916, she grew up on farms in Wisconsin and Illinois and graduated fro
m college into the Great Depression. She found employment as a magic-show promoter, which took her to small towns all over the country, and subsequently worked on the WPA Writers Project in advertising and industrial relations. During World War II, she directed the benefits program of a major meatpacking company for its more than eighty thousand employees in military service. She was married for forty-seven years to the late Harry Davis, an actor, with whom she traveled abroad extensively. She currently lives in Palisades, New York.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Introduction copyright © 1984 by Dorothy Salisbury Davis
“The Muted Horn,” copyright © 1957 by King-size Publications, Inc.
Copyright © 1952, 1953, 1954, 1959, 1963, 1964, 1971, 1975, 1980, 1981, 1983 by Dorothy Salisbury Davis
Cover design by Tracey Dunham
978-1-4804-6092-8
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
EBOOKS BY
DOROTHY SALISBURY DAVIS
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
Available wherever ebooks are sold
Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.
Videos, Archival Documents, and New Releases
Sign up for the Open Road Media newsletter and get news delivered straight to your inbox.
Sign up now at
www.openroadmedia.com/newsletters
FIND OUT MORE AT
WWW.OPENROADMEDIA.COM
FOLLOW US:
@openroadmedia and
Facebook.com/OpenRoadMedia
Tales for a Stormy Night: Fifteen Crime Stories Page 26